Sometimes I volunteer for a food-related charity. If the shutdown continues for a whole week, I encourage those of you who have food or money to spare to donate to your local food bank so that people who are losing WIC payments can still have some food choices. (MRAs can pass, if they don’t want any of their old canned goods going to “Ws”.)

There’s an Obamacare program that Republicans use more than …
www. washingtonpost. com/…/theres-an-obamacare-program-that-republican…

Aug 21, 2013 – Most Democrats support it, most Republicans oppose it and … health coverage through their parents’ policy than young Democrats, … The Commonwealth Fund study suggests that the partisan divide over Obamacare may not restrain who signs up. …. More cons have their kids on their policies than dems.

1. Ironically, GOPers are likely to be heavy users of Obamacare. Their fundie base tends to be poor, uneducated, and dumb. And less likely to have health care. In fact, parts of that demographic are dying younger these days, mostly rural women in the south and west, probably due to lack of access to health care.

2. As the google capture above says, more Republicans than Democrats have put their adult kids on their policies, something you can now do until age 26.

The USDA estimates that most states will be able to continue WIC operations as usual for “a week or so” before running out of money. The department’s Food and Nutrition Service has a contingency fund of only $125 million available for this $7 billion annual appropriation.

So far the situation is most dire in Arkansas and Utah, according to Rev. Douglas Greenaway, who heads up nonprofit advocacy group the National WIC Association. Utah’s WIC program, which already serves 65,000 moms and babies, has now stopped accepting new participants.

“There are health consequences when mothers cannot provide food and nutrition for their kids,” said Rev. Greenaway. “There’ll be no infant formula and no breastfeeding support. If the baby doesn’t latch, that’s it.”

[…]

“Small town America doesn’t have a lot of these resources,” she said. “Our WIC clinics are the first places women will go. We have hospital breast pumps here. We have support for babies with special needs. These aren’t available easily in some communities.”

Stacey Ninness at Oklahoma City’s WIC office concurred. She sees about 5,000 moms each month, many of whom have no other access to medical instruments for help with breastfeeding. “We’re going to see a huge impact with hunger,” she said. “These women can’t afford formula.”

Because women on WIC have to attend regular nutrition classes in order to obtain food vouchers, Ninness worries her social workers might miss signs of iron deficiencies or even child abuse as clinics close their doors. She added that her office provides special baby formulas that aren’t readily available elsewhere for kids with illnesses or allergies.

Many more state WIC programs will be limping along until their reserves run out, said Douglas Greenaway, president of the National WIC Association, a nonprofit group that advocates for the program. The USDA is currently trying to prop up some WIC programs in the neediest states with $125 million in contingency funds, but Greenaway said that safety net will only provide a limited number of resources.

Arkansas, for instance, was planning to furlough its employees and stop providing new WIC vouchers to recipients. But the USDA said it will prop up Arkansas’ program on a week-by-week basis.

“We were going to try to send [recipients] over to Medicaid to see if there were any other options for them,” said Cathy Flanagin, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Health. “But now I would say, at least for today, it’s business as usual.”

The District of Columbia said its contingency plan could keep the WIC program running for 48 days. But program enrollees in other jurisdictions may start seeing their food vouchers rejected.

“In all likelihood in coming days, as states run out of money, vendors will be told they cannot accept those checks,” said Greenaway.

Greenaway called the shutdown a “double whammy” for the program, because in addition to losing access to foods and other kinds nutritional assistance for themselves and their babies, women could completely lose faith in the program’s ability to help them.

“Part of the problem here is spreading fear and alarm among vulnerable mothers and kids,” he said. “We have nobody to blame but Congress, and a very specific bunch of them.”

Yesterday, House Republicans came up with a novel idea to fund only the parts of the government that people would notice – things like the Veterans Administration and national parks – in an attempt to point the latest in a series of fingers at the opposition for their cruelty in ignoring important priorities. Democrats thundered back that such piecemeal efforts are “not serious” and “no way to fund a government.”

But that is exactly how one part of the government was funded just before the September 30 deadline. Without fanfare on Monday night, President Obama signed the “Pay Our Military Act,” ensuring paychecks throughout the government shutdown for all members of the armed forces, including active-duty reserve members, along with civilian personnel and contractors who happen to “provide support” to armed forces operations.

How can I put this delicately? This is wrong.

[…]

Moreover, as Heather Hurlburt of the National Security Network recently pointed out, military operations increasingly rely on civilians, to help with supply lines, travel orders, mess hall activities, intelligence gathering and much more. Paying military service members during the shutdown is actually paying the defense industry to pretend like they’re working. It’s not for nothing that the Pentagon spent $5 billion on weapons the night before the shutdown, before the logistical support staff all vanished.

That’s just the information part. The whole rant’s well worth reading:

After all, among those public servants sitting at home today include men and women who save lives every day, finding cures for diseases at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. They include those who ensure that Americans in need get life-saving necessities, such as employees with the Social Security Administration or the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness or the Womens, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program. They include those who go out on the front lines every single day to protect Americans from poison, injury and death, like the brave folks at the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Numerous Americans won’t get flu shots because of the shutdown. 200 cancer patients a week will get turned away from federal clinical research centers. If the military deserves their pay because they keep Americans from being killed, then those who quite literally keep Americans alive probably rate the same treatment.

Are you a WIC recipient or know a WIC participant that is willing to talk to the media about how WIC is important to you? The govt shutdown will negatively impact WIC and close clinics. It’s important to get media and Congress to see WIC’s importance!! Please send a private FB message or email slee [at] nwica.org

Pteryxx,
And the sad thing is that the cons in southern states have vilified The La Leche League, whose volunteers would happily step up to help those women with breastfeeding.
When my daughter gave birth in North Texas, her doctor sneered at me and called me “inflexible and old-fashioned” when I mentioned that I had been a La Leche League Leader when I was a young mother.
I think that the docs are getting kick-backs from the formula companies, so they actually try to discourage those Moms from breastfeeding and actually give quite a bit of “advice” that sabotages their efforts.

Pteryxx,
And the sad thing is that the cons in southern states have vilified The La Leche League, whose volunteers would happily step up to help those women with breastfeeding.
When my daughter gave birth in North Texas, her doctor sneered at me and called me “inflexible and old-fashioned” when I mentioned that I had been a La Leche League Leader when I was a young mother.
I think that the docs are getting kick-backs from the formula companies, so they actually try to discourage those Moms from breastfeeding and actually give quite a bit of “advice” that sabotages their efforts.

Yeah, that’s your one experience though. Mine in the southwest was the exact opposite. I was guilted, lectured, and shamed into “Breast feeding is the best and only way!! Don’t you love your baby?!?!”. Then when I actually couldn’t breast feed, it became so, so, so, much worse. La Leche League was a frequent mention from nurses and other mothers. I can’t remember if my doctor mentioned them, but the pressure from other women was so much more (and more harming) so I’m not surprised I can’t remember what the one man said in all the fuss.

It is truly getting mind-boggling. How can any republican look themselves in the mirror and not see either that they are outright liars or simply stupid at this point? Only a business man that is looking at raking in the dollars for having to shut down things and will be making more money to fire things back up, or a complete moron, will look at this shutdown as a good thing.

It cost money to shut down things. It wasted time to shut down things. It will cost more money to bring things back on line. It will waste more time to bring things back on line. There is now less money in the economy since a significant portion of the population has no job. Tourism (and thus spending that supports the economy) has been slowed down. Local businesses (large and small) make less money. Even if you republican and libertarian retards want to bury your heads to avoid the news of how you are hurting the citizens of this nation, there is nothing about this that supports your stated goal of helping the economy. It only hurts the economy.

And all of this stupidity because you don’t want to back a legal law that was originally written by the Heritage Foundation. Yes, the conservative Heritage Foundation. The Affordable Care Act is a frickin Republican and Libertarian dream come true. But since Obama backs it, you have to act like you were back in elementary school. No, that’s not fair to elementary school children…they are a hell of lot smarter than you simple-minded idiots.

All you backers of the republicans have been brought down to the 2 aforementioned choices. You are either liars or stupid. You’ve run out of excuses. Pick which group you want to be in, but have no doubt that you only belong in one of those two groups.

Only a business man that is looking at raking in the dollars for having to shut down things and will be making more money to fire things back up, or a complete moron, will look at this shutdown as a good thing.

There are other beneficiaries, too. Churches are going to see this as a good thing, too, as it means those who were getting obligation-free support are now forced to beg for help from these organizations (which can come with strings attached). Alternatively, it can merely be used as a justification for begging for more donations.

In the olden days, even if you couldn’t rely on “compassion”, most politicians were smart enough to know that spending money on meeting the nutrition needs of very young children is important to their health and saves healthcare dollars in the long run.

Interrupting scientific research is also an *awesome* form of waste. :-p

Domestic violence programs across the country say they have received letters from federal offices that dole out grant money informing them that after Friday, if the government is not reopened, they will cease operations and the programs won’t be able to draw down the funds they normally rely on. While some may be able to weather the storm, small, rural programs and those that rely heavily on federal money are looking at layoffs and disruptions in service.

…Other programs confirmed they had gotten similar letters from OJP and other agencies. “The whole country has been told the same thing by the Office on Violence Against Women,” Kim Gandy, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, told ThinkProgress. “We also have coalitions across the country that have been unable to draw down their reimbursements from FVPSA [Family Violence Prevention and Services Act] for funds already expended, which means they don’t have operating funds going forward. Some are already discussing layoffs.”

…But more and more women have been seeking help as the same economic troubles caused by the recession and stagnant recovery have increased and intensified abuse. Eight in 10 shelters report an increase in women seeking help and nearly 60 percent say the abuse is more violent than before the crisis.

In any case, I thought it might be worthwhile to lay out in one handy chart how, state by state, this will affect people. Under pre-ACA law, each state sets its own eligibility level for Medicaid. In more liberal states, these levels are fairly high; for instance, Massachusetts gives Medicaid to families up to 133 percent of poverty, New York up to 150 percent, and Minnesota up to 215 percent. But in conservative states, the levels are far stingier; as someone in the Times article says, “You got to be almost dead before you can get Medicaid in Mississippi.” In addition, in most states childless adults can’t get Medicaid no matter how poor they are, but under the ACA it will no longer matter whether you have children. This is just one more way conservative states that forego the Medicaid expansion (for which the federal government is picking up almost the entire tab, by the way) are harming their own citizens.

[…]

When you look at these income eligibility levels, you see just how cruel the existing system is. For instance, in Alabama, you can’t get Medicaid if your income exceeds 23 percent of the poverty level, or $4,500 for a family of three. Just think about that for a second. Do you think you could find a place to live, pay your bills, and feed your family on that income? But the state of Alabama says if you’re that rich, you can afford to buy health insurance.